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Some of the voice-mails were broadcast -- ones arranging a meth buy. From KUSA-TV (Denver)late Thursday (only a day after Haggard's denial broadcast there):

"Hi Mike, this is Art [Haggard's gay-pay-for-sex pseudonym]. Hey, I was just calling to see if we could get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply."

The station also played a second message, left a few hours later, which began: "Hi Mike, this is Art, I am here in Denver and sorry that I missed you. But as I said, if you want to go ahead and get the stuff, then that would be great. And I'll get it sometime next week or the week after or whenever."

The sex worker who made the revelations, Mike Jones, said he has more voice mail messages from Haggard, as well as an envelope he said Haggard used to mail him cash.

One thing's for sure, Jones is highly believable when he says he's no gay rights movement pawn. He is about as ordinary-guy-wanting-to-do-right-about-the-hypocrite-but-hardly-conversant-on-the-nuances-of-gay-political-speak as they come.

AP reports that the acting senior pastor at New Life, Ross Parsley, told KKTV-TV of Colorado Springs that Haggard admitted that some of the accusations were true. Said Parsley, "There is an admission of some guilt."

I can't help but wonder if this Ross Parsley is any relation to Pastor Rod Parsley, a rabidly antigay megachurch preacher from Columbus, Ohio, who, in encouraging his followers to put a stop to the gay rights movement, actually told them to "lock and load", screaming this exhortation over the airwaves again and again until he grew hoarse.

I'm also wondering what Haggard's absolute denials to the press are about, given the evidence arrayed opposite them. He's couched the denials in terms of having a relationship. Is Haggard just claiming that paying for sex doesn't constitute a relationship? He's also talking in the sort of terms that Clinton's sexual denials took and which so many gay men have heard from so many on the down low -- a sort of sexual 'what is is' denial based on active and passive sexual roles.

If that's the case, a Foley-esque rehab stint isn't gonna cut it where achieving something approaching mental health is concerned -- if he gets that far and doesn't check into some quack outfit like Memphis, Tennessee's Love In Action or merely get his wrist slapped by his church after doing a halfway decent imitation of Jimmy Swaggart's confess'n'cry. His niece, Carolyn Haggard, is the spokesperson for the four-person church review panel that'll deal with him, after all.

If it was just another case of rank hypocrisy, it would be a couple of news cycles' worth of eeuuwww's worth and we'd all move on.

But, as even the conservative commentator, Scarborough, says, Haggard's been "all fire and brimstone with absolutely no love" (not dissimilar from his q4.5wks emergency loveless sex fix) against us. He and the antigay GOP "made their bed and now they're lying in it."

His downfall has attached to it some 30 million evangelicals, fellow Colorado Springser Rev. James Dobson (who said about this that it's "unconscionable that the legitimate news media would report a rumor like this based on nothing but one man's accusation" -- a statement not dissimilar from his initial defenses of Foley and the Republican machine that covered his bad acts up, calling the initial accusation "some sort of a joke by the boy and some of the other pages" according to a Denver Post article quoted on BlogActive), and the Bush White House itself. (Haggard was a key participant in weekly Karl Rove and the evangelicals policy conference calls where Rove clues in religious political extremist leaders in on policy pushes and what they can do to further the agenda thru their spheres of influence.)

The conflict between the depth of the beliefs of these players that merely being gay is "a descent into depravity" -- fully acted out in swallow it whole fashion by these sad closeted/semi-closeted self-loathers -- including the use of homophobia as a campaign strategy and the chummy dependent relationship they have with us as stellar, critical-to-their-success insiders amongst them is mind-blowing.

I wish it didn't take slogging through the muck to get to the other side of it but, here we are, holding our noses and plowing ahead.

On the other side is a world where, among other things, being gay is not considered so much worse than scoring methamphetamine via your Rentboy.com regular trick that a hapless adult would concoct a series of lies about it that reek of a little kid trying to weasel out of getting punished after getting caught red-handed with the proof of his wrongdoing.

Hey, Rev. Ted, the voice print expert has confirmed that the voicemails are yours, you said, "I was just calling to see if we could get any more [emphasis mine]" -- meaning that it wasn't just a one-time thing like you're claiming, there's an envelope with your middle-name pseudonym in the return address spot that's handwritten and just waiting for a handwriting expert's confirmation, and only real perverts go to gay escorts' apartments over and over again and only get a massage!